25 February 2008

People Don't Enjoy Being Force Fed

Do you have an app you are really proud of? One this might be of negligible value to your customers? Don't force feed it to people. I just wanted to install this HP Deskjet we had lying around and it forced me to spend about 10 minutes and 200 meg to install a piece of software I will never use but, I guarantee you, will pop up automatically from time to time and annoy the hell out of me. Essential indeed.

To just complete the rant, when the app was done, the hourglass did not go away:

And, the final application has a wonderful design where all options are designed to look grayed out.

These are actually valid selections. They just look gray.

In addition, I know already from the other users in my office that I will have to go through significant hoop jumping to stop the auto-loading and unnecessary HP printer software from auto-loading every time I boot. Why is this necessary? Because the software will always look for the printer and tell me it's not there repeatedly ... even when I'm away from the office.

HP apparently doesn't know about laptops which move around a lot.

But, overall, my major question is this: Why does software that comes bundled with hardware always suck? And, since this software is mostly unnecessary, why bother having it at all? All I really need is a printer driver.